Meta E5 (US) phone screen + onsite : reject : learnings
- Location
- US
- Posted
- 23 May 2025
Summary
I had a phone screen and onsite interview for an E5 role at Meta in the US and was rejected. I am sharing my experience and learnings, including specific phone screen questions and hints for onsite questions, while honoring an NDA.
How it went
Giving back to the community. Since I signed an NDA right after phone screen and before the onsite, I will honour it, will post the phone screen questions, but only hints for the onsite ones.
Phone Screen-
- LC 121 - No variant
- Not LC tagged - a binary search question similar to LC 1891
Behaviour
- Standard questions, should be easy if you really have good experiences
Coding 1
- LC tagged, no variant, involves some sort of dfs on a list
- Not in LC, variant of finding a certain area in a matrix, again involves dfs
System design
- One of the "below the line" items from hello interview. Involves storing media files.
Coding 2
- Variant of LC tagged, about extracting subset of data from a given data, involves heap.
- Another LC tagged heap question, find a specific one instead of subset.
Questions asked (3)
- 01
Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock
Data Structures & Algorithms · Easy
Open the problemGiven an array
priceswhereprices[i]is the price of a given stock on thei-th day. You want to maximize your profit by choosing a single day to buy one stock and choosing a different day in the future to sell that stock. Return the maximum profit you can achieve. If you cannot achieve any profit, return 0. - 02
Cutting Ribbons (Binary Search Variant)
Data Structures & Algorithms · Medium
Open the problemA binary search problem similar to LeetCode 1891, which is 'Cutting Ribbons'. In LC 1891, given an array of integers
ribbons, whereribbons[i]represents the length of thei-th ribbon, and an integerk, you may cut any ribbon any number of times. You want to obtainkribbons of the same positive integer lengthx. Return the maximum possible positive integer lengthxthat you can obtain. This problem is a variant of that concept. - 03
System Design: Storing Media Files
System Design
Design a system for storing media files. This relates to "below the line" functional requirements discussed in 'Hello Interview' resources, indicating a focus on non-functional requirements or detailed implementation aspects.
How they prepared
Solve all meta tagged LC questions from at least 3 months (better 6 months), suboptimal won't work (that's what happened for me), have to be the optimal one. Don't just memorize, get to the depth of it, variants might surprise you. If you are looking at hello interview questions, also prepare for "below the line" functional requirements.